"Tax Fairness for Every Generation"
Proceeds to increase how much money they'll siphon off the upcoming intergenerational wealth transfer
I'm quite pissed at this. And to add to the annoyance, since this is a budget change, it is unlikely an incoming Conservative government can realistically reverse it, as the assumption of the income this represents for the government will baked in to expenses. Cutting any spending here ends up being a battle, so it reprends more energy and focus the incoming administration will have to expend, and if they just reverse the change without cuts the Liberals will smugly say "but I thought we needed to get the deficit under control?"
pigeonburger
17d ago
It makes my brain hurt
pigeonburger
28d ago
It's often negative in the short term, but there are a lot of small causes that the news just doesn't care about and wouldn't mention if it weren't that some people made themselves a nuisance. It's a long term play, to not let your cause be forgotten or ignored. It's better to make people angry about you than let them ignore you.
For those specific examples, climate protestors have full elite backing now, the strategy is different. It's intimidation, they're used by the elites to show what they are willing to destroy if people don't bow down.
pigeonburger
24d ago
I'm not sure it's so much complexity I'm avoiding now but games that don't respect my time.
I used to love JRPGs, it was my favorite genre. I can't really do it anymore. They seem like so much pointless busy work. Closest thing to one I've been able to play a bit of (and even then) is Triangle Strategy, and that's a tactical JRPG. I guess tactical RPGs I can still stomach a bit because fights feel like distinct chapters that I can do one and feel done with for the night while feeling I've actually moved forward.
On the opposite side, three genres I never imagined I would ever enjoy, have become my favorites: hard simulators (the harder and drier the game, the better), shmups and fighting games. All of which are so much more challenging and complex than JRPGs, which are usually only difficult if you're impatient and don't level up properly, but all of which feel so much more significant than raising arbitrary numbers because I need them to move forward.
Ultimately this is the reason why I consider Trump to be easily the best option americans have had in a long time. Of course a wise and devoted to the population's well-being president/king would be best, but at least a vanitous president is a lot easier to keep aligned with the population's wishes than the puppet of a PMC that believes they should be the one deciding what the population should desire. The former just has to be reminded that the population will love him if he does what they want. The only thing that seems to motivate the PMC to go along or pretend to go along with the population's wishes is the threat of losing to a populist who could undo their long term sociocultural engineering projects.
All true, but I'd point out that these are the reasons why the US is currently on top. For the most part, it's where the US is coming from, not necessarily where it's headed. For many of those, the US is headed away from them. Like for (2), selective scrutiny of business dealings and of regulatory observance for being on the wrong side of politics is increasingly visible in the US; I don't know if it's more or less the case than before, but it's certainly more high profile. Musk might not be facing jail right now, but there's a large group of people, in some states a majority, who would electorally reward public officials for finding any reason to go after him. There's a large (and growing) group of people who believe Musk (or anyone) should not have been able to make that much money in the first place and that such wealth can only have come from some illegitimate or immoral acts, and while these people are not in power right now (because the elites don't believe it, they just use it for electoral purposes), it could only take one populist rising at the wrong time to ruin the idea that the US is a safe place to do business in.
pigeonburger
2mo ago
Is there a way to tell which of these is true?
I don't think so, but let's dive into each one.
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It's true that most users probably don't notice the sculpting, but then again, they do notice that for some reason, somehow, Google has gotten worse. I don't know if the sculpting is the issue with search, I don't think anyone outside Google (and maybe inside Google too) knows the exact reason why Google Search sucks now, but since for Gemini's image generation it seems exceedingly likely sculpting was the reason for images not matching the expectations of the prompter, then I think we should assign a fairly high probability to it being at least part of the cause for the degradation of service for search too. And as dominant as Google is now, changing search engines is very easy, low friction, so once a competitor gets enough traction it might turn out to have been very counterproductive.
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I think people at the very top could dial back if they wanted to, as long as it's not framed to be dialing back on the commitment to ideology, but as a technical matter; they don't have to give any rationale except degradation of the service. Companies have been laying off DEI employees/departments with little pushback, because companies still officially run on the rules that put finances above ideology (for now). As long as it's because the company needs to trim some of the less "core" employees, and not framed as "our customers and employees hate everything the DEI department has been doing". So while businesses are not allowed to explicitely retreat from the ideological battleground, they still have the latitude to excuse themselves for technical reasons.
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This one seems pretty unfalsifiable and conspiracy minded. I don't think most people outside of extremist political operatives think along those terms. And demoralization is easily countered by reminding oneself that if it was truly hopeless, they wouldn't need the propaganda, whether it's opinion shaping or demoralizing.
pigeonburger
2mo ago
Besides, the original Gamergaters were utterly vanquished. Gaming is one of the wokest industries now, unlike back then when there was a sense that it wasn't too late to claw it back from the brink.
Would not say utterly vanquished, it was a pyrrhic victory for the press and wokies at best. Gaming journalists barely exist anymore, sure some of that can be blamed on existing trends towards independent video bloggers and streamers and the threat of AI, but you know what would have surely helped them weather these conditions better? Not having alienated the very core fandom of the topic they're covering, those that would have kept consuming high quality written content about their favorite topic, if that had been what was on offer. As for the game industry itself, it's not doing so hot, especially on the western AAA side. Again, alienating the core fans lost them the support they would have needed in these tougher economic times. Meanwhile, it's not like gamers could really lose to begin with; they're the one with the money and who drive the transactions. If the western AAA market refuses to make games they want, well, if there's demand there's gonna be some clever indies or 2nd tier devs snapping up the opportunity. And there's always Japan. And the past can't be taken away from them, there's an essentially infinite back catalog to explore.
I think part is that the audience on Mac skewing older and more well-heeled, and that outside of multimedia, Macs were not very well equipped to play games for their era, especially for the price. If you wanted a computer for the kids to play games, there were usually cheaper and better suited alternatives. Cheap 8 bits micros were better for games than early monochrome Macs with only beeps, then Amigas were much better equipped with their dedicated sound and graphics chips, then with 486s and above and VGA and SVGA PCs were able to push more complex graphics.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Americans can correct me if I'm wrong but from what I hear, their votes are worth the same. Seniority matters as to who decides who gets to write opinions. The most senior member of the majority (which is automatically the chief justice if he is in the majority) assigns redaction of the opinion to one of the members of the majority. Same happens for the dissenting opinion (most senior judge in the dissent, automatically the chief justice if he is dissenting with the majority, choses who writes the opinion).
So seniority is important, but not THAT important. What does matter though is that their opinion is taken into serious consideration by other judges. Ideally, a judge to the Supreme Court should never be a blindly partisan hack, but in practice it can (very charitably) said that they are at least preselected for an extreme adherence to one school of thought with regard to how flexible the Constitution should be. But a particularly eloquent opinion might be able to sway swing votes or even peel off a justice or two from the other bloc, so experience and quality as a justice matters.
What strategies do Mottizens follow for a good social life?
Creating and following a tradition. For over 12 years my friends and I made a weekly habit of meeting at a specific neighborhood bar every tuesday evening. Not everyone is there every week, sometimes life gets in the way, but being there is the expected default, and we can assume we're busy those evenings and try not to schedule anything else then.
Sure, once a week is nothing compared to the socializing people used to do, but most people I mention this tradition to seem to envy it.
pigeonburger
2mo ago
Following posting this comment ( https://www.themotte.org/post/900/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/193633?context=8#context ) regarding a law that I believe should only apply to those who would want to impose it on the population, I have been playing in my head with the idea of a "Higher Standards" bill for politicians. The idea would be that all laws apply maximally to elected officials; in situations where prosecutors or judges find themselves with any discretion in their ability to prosecute or punish crime committed by an elected official, even in their personal life, they should forced to start their process from the point of the harshest possible position. They would be forced to prosecute jaywalking, the slightest driving infraction, etc... and start the mental accounting for sentencing / fining with the longest sentences or highest fines before any mitigating circumstances can apply. Details as to whether it would apply to actions before the enactment of the bill, or to accession to public office could be negociated either way. A grace period could be left open to allow rewriting laws before it applied.
I see a lot of positives coming out of such a bill. The main one is to urge restraint in writing laws. Legislators pass laws knowing that it is unlikely that they would ever be used against them and care very little that these laws are held over the population like the sword of Damocles that could at any moment be applied by a prosecutor looking to make an example or please a private sponsor. If you want to vote for a law criminalizing piracy, you should yourself be able to account for every single piece of digital content you have. If you want to curtail "hate speech" you better be damn certain that whatever comments you make today on either side of the Israel/Palestine conflict will not be considered "hate speech" by the standards of tomorrow, etc... While I don't believe it would stop all of it, I think it would force legislators to reconsider some laws that achieve little but make technical criminals of very average people for widespread actions.
Other benefits I see is that it would encourage legislators to pay attention to the technical minutia of the laws they're passing, outside of the pork they're able to fit in it and how it will play with interest groups. It would also discourage criminals from running for office.
I struggle to see negatives; technically it could discourage effective would-be politicians from running for office if they believe that this is going to be weaponized against them. And I guess it would be a struggle to pass as politicians obviously would hate it, but without any arguments to bring forward I think they would find it hard to convince their constituents that voting against it is anything but voting against their interest. And it would take only a few fairly clean politicians to make some noise in favor of such a bill, willing to trade the benefits of future criminality in exchange for the large boost such a clear pro-plebeian move would give them.
I guess it could also be argued it's a very legalistic, low-trust society move, which I would concede, but that's the point I believe we are at in much of the west. That when the system is seen as benevolent it is fine to leave cops with the discretion to decide, for instance, when it's in the public's interest to disperse disruptive people for vague reasons like "loitering" or to punish antisocial speech as "hate speech", but when I do not trust the system, until that trust is restored I would rather know exactly what the rules of the game are, and so I want lawmakers to be highly interested in making sure that rules are crystal clear too.
So are there any negatives I'm not seeing? Has any similar law been enacted elsewhere and what has it led to? I see lots of references in the anglosphere to proposed bills claiming to hold elected officials to a higher standard, but for the most part it seems like it's either object-level transparency laws (which of course, we need too, but won't encourage restraint in lawmaking), too vague or obviously meant to be solely weaponized against the proposer's rival (laws against "lying", or against "contesting election results" or whatever else of that kind).
pigeonburger
2mo ago
A lot of the knife answers seem to assume maximum stupidity from the bat fighter and maximum cunning from the knife fighter. That the only strike someone could do with a baseball bat is a big homerun swing. I'm pretty sure most people would figure out that's not all they can do with a bat within seconds of thinking of it as a weapon, and of how to avoid ending up being knifed. Most importantly, a quick overhead bonk (think kendo strikes) leaves you a lot less vulnerable if you miss than a swing, and if the opponent tries to catch it or to block it they will open up the entirety of their body to kicks. While that is not going to kill or even knock out in one shot, just one overhead bonk connecting is likely more than enough to end the fight; the amount of force in it would be enough to have the opponent reeling for long enough to line up another one, and another one, ect... And as for knife fighters, winning with one requires knowing something that is not really commonly known: you will not incapacitate someone with a knife. The targets that can incapacitate are small and an untrained person is not going to hit them on a resisting target. An expert probably wouldn't even bother either. The way to win with a knife is that you tie them down another way (say, by tackling them to the ground), and THEN you do damage with the knife, repeatedly. But the knife is essentially useless to win if you are not able to tie down the other guy, and with no distractions he has a big heavy piece of wood he's highly interested in keeping between you and him.
pigeonburger
3mo ago
The powers that be seem intent on making examples of very average people these days. We've seen extreme prosecution of actions that "reasonable people" would believe would not draw nearly that much individual attention from the government (trucker protest in Canada, J6). And the other side is worried about the idea that, for instance, a right-wing government could use private collected information to identify and deport immigrants. "If you haven't done anything wrong (or big) you have nothing to fear" is not convincing to anyone.
seek and destroy
It's more remind and dissuade.
With one very notable exception, public violence in the US and Canada tends to be criminal rather than terroristic, and when it's terroristic, it's usually a lone wolf. At least for now (until cartel or jihadist violence significantly rises), criminals and criminal organisations there are not exactly geared for high level violence. And for those organisations, public violence is not a smart solution anyway, it attracts too much attention and it's bad for business. Cops with pistols are plenty enough to intimidate them into avoiding public violence. And while lone wolves can buy fancy weapons and equipment in the US, they're by the nature of being "lone" wolves, immediately outnumbered as soon as two cops or armed civilians show up. Europe has more of a problem with jihadist groups with international funding and sometimes high end equipment, a disregard for their own lives and a mission that makes public violence a goal in itself rather than an unfortunate detour to another end. A group of 5-10 of them can outgun and outnumber the police on the scene for enough time to do a lot of damage. These people are not intimidated by a cop with a holstered pistol, they need to be reminded that the country they're thinking of attacking has a military, and that this military is close enough to respond quickly.
pigeonburger
4mo ago
However, the suggestion that we can confidently assert that no such intervention will ever be necessary is preposterous. I don’t think we have any good reason to believe that the medical bodies governing medical transition for minors are invulnerable to the kinds of social dynamics and institutional failures that have afflicted every other kind of medical body,4 and doctors as a profession (as the examples above illustrate) are notorious for closing ranks and circling the wagons at the first whiff of a potential scandal. To simply declare by fiat “the medical bodies governing transition for minors will always be able to self-regulate and course-correct, governmental oversight or intervention is not necessary and never will be” is shockingly naïve.
I think this point bears highlighting. A lot of the "believe the science" message seems to hinge on the belief that scientists, doctors and other highly credentialed professionals are, within their sphere of expertise, able to ignore misaligned incentives and politics that history and experience has shown time and time and time and time again are universal. The original scientific method created an adversarial system to counteract these human failings, to align the incentives with bold truth finding. But nowadays coordination at the size of our current scientific institutions has misaligned the incentives again, to put them in line with affirming the consensus and the political class.
Seeing that over a summer it was free game to take over neighborhoods, torch police stations, do nightly assaults on federal courtrooms, attempting to blind police officers, and in the previous years interrupt official proceedings (supreme court nominations), some people could have been given a wrong impression, yes. Not so much that the government wouldn't be interested in it, but that the judiciary branch would be so captured as to do what looks at least to one side like enforcing laws on blatantly political lines.
I was a big user for a couple of years here, after we got full legalization. Saying it kills motivation is right; I wouldn't say it does it directly, but indirectly by making you boring and okay with being bored. I've mostly stopped not because I made a choice to stop, but because my wife is now living with me, she doesn't use it and I don't think it would be fair for me to be so boring to be around when she's there. When she's not there, I usually have other things I want to do that would bore her but entertain me so I don't really need to make myself okay with boredom.
pigeonburger
3mo ago
This is it, yes.
If there was a widespread invasion of privacy by our governments in the physical realm, as in once every year when you're out of the home a team of detectives (or to make the analogy more 1:1, a sophisticated automated drone) breaks in and inspect your home for evidence of crimes without warrants, we would very likely have at least some evidence that they did. If they did it in the digital realm, we would have... Exactly the evidence we have right now: no clear admission that it is so but also courts allowing "de-anonymising" of people of interest, implying they actually do intercept data without any kind of warrants, whistleblowers like Snowden, etc...
OP can dismiss it as "QAnon" stuff if he wants, but there's a hightened general distrust of our governments nowadays from both the left and the right. The red tribe today has reason to believe that the legal system, including police and the judiciary are weaponized against them, there's a discussion about such here today. You can disagree, but even if you do I think it's unfair to call it unreasonable to believe. And the blue tribe loudly frets about scenarios where if the red tribe gains power again they will weaponize government against them. So concerns about surveillance being in the interest of legitimate police interventions are convincing no one.
Bat is a better fighting weapon, knife is a more lethal weapon. I would say the person with the bat wins more often than not, but it's more likely that "and then he dies from bleeding out after winning" for the bat wielder than the opposite "and then he dies from the delayed effects of a concussion/brain hemmorage" for the knife wielder.
Reasoning: The bat can be held out forward to maintain distance. Can be held with the off hand in the middle to be turned into a shorter cudgel to push away the opponent. It's not a matter for the knife guy to just "close the distance once and stab with the knife" like some sort of ninja: people who who get stabbed while hopped up on adrenaline keep fighting, most of the time, only to bleed out later. Very often they don't even realize they've been stabbed until after. People with shattered arms or legs immediately lose usage of them.
That kind of person exists, his name is Kanye West and it was hilarious until it started being sad as it became harder and harder to ignore that his outbursts, his inability to read social cues (to play armchair psychiatrist, I think he is likely a savant autist), were not only selecting him out of super-stardom but alienating him from friends and family.
pigeonburger
2mo ago
The main argument is that Section 230 as-is allows big tech to have their cake and eat it too. They can claim to be not liable for user content on the basis that they cannot control what is posted on them, then turn around and heavily "curate" content on political grounds. The idea would be to repeal Section 230 and replace it with an alternative that forces a consistent position; either you curate content and are liable for the content you allow, or you aren't liable but have to tolerate wrongthink on your platform.
I'm not sure about the Swedes, but for the the British and the French I think a good part of it is in the national temperament. The British are legalists. They will only consider solutions to their predicament that paint inside the lines, even if the lines are so restrictive as to bind them from responding effectively to intimidation. While the French can be at any specific moment more or less accepting than the British, as a people if the wind changes they would be willing to take bolder actions. I can't ever imagine the British going for "repatriation" for any reason; from their perspective British citizens are all equal, period, and even permanent residents have rights and cannot be discriminated against directly. Any law to resolve these issues would have to be a carefully thought out meta-level law that doesn't single out anything in particular. But if the muslim population pushes the French the wrong way a couple more times, they might find these kind of solutions on the table. The French are willing to make object-level laws specifically against things they don't like, even if it's "unfair". See, law against the islamic veil. It's not going to stop youths from lashing out, but it might make more organized attempts at bullying the local population less attractive, as it tends to make the french hate muslims, not hold hands and sing "Don't Look Back In Anger" while decrying hatred in all its forms.
pigeonburger
4mo ago
The only people who might call them on it are other scientists and scientists are a cliquey bunch.
Some professions requires the public trusting that you will prefer defending their interest over defending your in-group. Doing these jobs properly require taking a skeptical, sometimes even adversarial stance towards your colleagues. Cops, judges, journalists, doctors and scientists come to mind; any hint of wagon-circling from these harms society greatly.
Leftists and young democrats voters have to be thrown a bone because they're threatening not to show up to vote for Biden over Israel. It's just that.
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